tap into a cat 5 phone line

[mmmmmmm]

i'm 'helping' run a phone line to a new room at a friends house.
they have voip - don't know the company- so no phone
connector box. there is a phone line running near the room
that i can tap into, but it is cat 5. how do i find which
two lines of the 8 are the phone lines?
thank you.

 

[jsw]

You'll need to find either end of it to be sure. No matter what might supposed to be the 2 or 4 wires to be used, you don't know until you look at the end(s).

Are you sure you can't run another wire? It's a much better thing to do in the long run, esp. if they ever want to use the line for ethernet in the future.

 

[realityisterror]

It depends entirely on the installer, which is why you chould be glad there's only... 28 combinations of 2 wires with 8 choices...

Honestly, it shouldn't be that hard.

Try color + color/white combinations first.

As hmmfe says below, blue is usually used first.

 

[hmmfe]

Well, it could be any of the 4 pairs as jsw says. But to give you something to go on, I'd try the blue/white, blue pair first. Then try the orange/white, orange pair. If the wiring is to standard, the blue pair is line 1 and the orange pair is line 2.